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Month: September 2015

What does it take to realise that love is real and love is blind? All it takes is a hit and trial. We all give it a chance to let someone inside our hearts. At first, everyone fails. We raise our expectations in trying to be selfless. What we do is what we become but how much we commit always differs. On a rainy day, my mom gave me an umbrella, but that day I enjoyed dancing with someone in the rain. Love is care and the unexpected. I love you both.

Anger does not need a build up but frustration and giving up does. At sudden moments, we slip and fall on the floor. We get hurt in unconsciousness, but we have time to get up to our feet. We need supports till we can get on our feet. If you are boxing, your best friend will blow you a knockout punch, which doesn’t mean he’s trying to hurt you. The blow you get is only making you strong. We fight who we love cause it’s worth fighting for. Some people are easy to earn a trust over and some are not. At times, I forget how much some people mean to me. At times, I look at my shadow and wonder if I’m smiling or simply sad. In the past, I found relief but not quite the comfort. In the present, there is a greater joy. Scenes of a year ago are all but black, white and blank. Today even in this dark room, there is a candle burning with me staring at the flame, not noticing the shadow behind. It’s so peaceful, the joy of a hug. It takes two synchronized beating of hearts to know the pleasures of life. It always seems to amuse me how we become close with people. To really understand someone, it takes time. Once someone makes you smile, it’s hard to forget. After all, we live for these moments. The feeling that we wish never goes way. All it takes is those whispering words and a touch to rejuvenate.

Happiness is at times sudden and at times something waiting to come. A distant relative might come to life, and sometimes you realise you’ve moved on from the past. We want us to be a better person tomorrow, and maybe we have become. Our opinions of people live in the past. We never know what this friend of ours could become tomorrow. Friends turn to enemies and foes turn to companions. All it takes is a smile to bring back the good times and to forget the bad ones. Everybody hurts and make us suffer. We dis and we fight, we love and we cry. Isn’t the feeling of tears running down our eyes beautiful? It tells us we stood up for something and that we cared so we were hurt. In emotions, we only get stronger and our hearts grow fond. Life is beautiful. Take it as it is. Perhaps happiness is right there in the corner, waiting for better days to surprise us. Be careful what you wish for, you might get it all.

The smell of the rain
The reign of the king
A pain so far away
Nothing can retrace
An altar of darkness
The shrine of one before
It’s cool and calm, composed
The sound of bells that toll
In greed there’s nothing mystic
Misty eyes and butterflies
A vase that didn’t break
Endless rivers of white souls
Green and bright over blight
Country hills that cry
A life without remorse
In nature I find my home
I row a boat over sorrow
Blue skies with clouds aligned
A small creak amongst the woods
Hides an angel in black hides
Leaving the empty spaces
Filled with laughter and cries
Tomorrow is another day
Bright sunshine on a rainy day

Motivation is derived from the word “motive” meaning “a reason for doing something” which came in use since the late 19th century. As google describes, motivation means “a reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way”. I think it has its pro’s and con’s. The way I see the word motivation, it is different than how it is defined. For me, it is more of a drive or a force that gives me the energy to do something. In recent days, my motivation is lost like my guitar picks; plenty there in the past but none with me now.

Let me figure out the things I needed to do growing up. As a kid at school, my parents wanted me to study and get good grades. For some reason, I never got the motivation to excel with education. I didn’t think it was important. I have my reasons. Unconsciously to me, knowledge was enough. I didn’t need to remember the definition of “health” just to know what it takes to be healthy. If it was important to me, I would remember it anyway. I remember this one time when my friend Abheeshu was taking around parents of my friends and he began telling the scientific names of trees and where they originated from. That was passion, not education. Nobody asked him to remember them, but his interests drove him. That was his motivation. What I was doing when I was the same time? I probably strum my guitar trying to act cool, wondering which hair gel and perfume should I get. In my teens, I lacked the motivation to do anything and it hasn’t still been found. For many reasons, motivation is a bad thing. I need to work on my project which I know is important, but I still won’t do it cause I lack motivation. When does this motivation kick in? A day before deadline only inducing panic. Even now I have a list of things to do, but I do not do it. Laziness kicks in. I’d rather prefer scrolling my Twitter feeds 10 times rather than start working on my project which requires as little as 10 hours to complete. An hour every day would have made it easier to complete the work rather than finishing it all in 10 hours before the deadline. Remind me of that MOTIVATION.

What do I do to do the things I need to do? Isn’t motivation such a bad thing. When you have to submit your work in just hours and you know your boss is going to kill you, you still don’t work on it cause you are bored. What the fuck? Boredom is my main motivator to not proceed with anything. Motivation itself lets me down. Many times at home, instead of working on something useful I pick up my guitar and start whining even in the middle of the night. I only do things that are joyful. I’d be thinking about watching a match between Tottenham and some Manchester or London club while I have my finals the very next day. How do I set my priorities? I’ll never know.

Motivation kicks in the most unusual of times. Mostly in the middle of the night, I remember how ignorant I have been to my family and friends and I start messaging them on IM’s. At times, I check my Pocket app on the phone and start reading the important things I saved to read when I was lazy to read them right away. Same story with my YouTube playlist which are mostly tutorials and stuff like that. I think morning is the time when I usually get these unusual motivations. In my sleep, somebody probably slaps me and tells me what I should be doing. There was this time when I wet my phone in the rain and I was without a phone for a week. After I got it back I did not use social media apps because I knew I was productive without them but slowly the social web drew me into the internet drama. An air of melancholy surrounds me knowing how the need of motivation to perform has let me down.

Perhaps some day I will start working without any motivation. Perhaps some day I’ll be a robot and a workaholic and finish all the works I was assigned for just days after it gets published. I’m not here to motivate you really. I’m just here to tell you to think about it. To be honest, I wouldn’t have posted this article if my coworker wasn’t bugging me to write one (I’m glad she did). Why? Cause I wasn’t motivated to write at the moment. All I can tell you is that all these “10 things to get you motivated” blogs or books or crap will not help you until you realize it yourself. If procrastination is your best friend, make him understand why something else is important to you. You don’t need good shoes to take you to good places, you need a drive and will to do so. Build it up and someday you never know, how high you’ll reach when you don’t need motivation to get everything done.

He was probably the scariest person that I knew in my school days. When Mr. Dominique Dev Dewan walked into that classroom of Class 4 Section A with his tinted bipolar glasses, everyone would get up their seats, standing at attention and their eyes looking straight. We would freeze our tongue and not move a muscle cause else we would be punished. If there was any comics or fancy magazines around, it was too late to save ourselves from embarrassment. We should get inside the classroom before he does or else we were in trouble. He needed his students to be disciplined. He demanded his students to have his influence in their lives and guess what sir, you’ve succeeded.

Let’s start with the fun part, the part where his speech was enough to wet our pants. For a small man, he had a sturdy voice. We could never question him. He set the rules and if we didn’t follow, we had to get ready for the consequences. Excuses wouldn’t work. Every English class would start with a punishment session. The victims of this sessions were the ones who gossiped in class, entered late in class or those who didn’t do their homework. It wasn’t a usual drubbing of our palm with a ruler, but much creative and entertaining. Now that I look at it, it wasn’t harsh. All of a sudden when it was his class, 5 wooden dusters would appear out of nowhere. The culprits would have to stand in front of the class to the left of Dewan sir who would start speaking and at random moments toss the dusters one by one. The students in being punished would jump to avoid the flying blocks and this is what we call performing Dewan sirs “Jhakri Dance”. As I recall there was a special punishment he called “Toxing” where he would clench his fist, place the thumb on our skull and quickly twist. That pain of his clenched finger was excruciating often leave us buzzing till the rest of the day. I almost forgot he threatened us that he would throw us out of the window. He almost did.

After two years, I moved from Makalu to the upper senior house. Like everyone else, I prayed that I was moved to Kanchenjunga where Dewan sir was head of house (HOH). He was the most petrifying teacher there was, but he was one of the best teachers in the entire school. Everyone prayed to god that they would be a member of Kanchenjunga, not the opposite house Annapurna. Why? Cause he was liberal and strict, yet human. We had less gardening hours, less cleaning hours, less attention to house beautification so to sum up with, he didn’t treat us as machines. It didn’t matter to him that we lost House of the Month as long as he was satisfied with our commitment. He wasn’t a pusher and he was there to guide us always. He only demanded discipline and for which everyone had deep respect. In the singing competition, we didn’t sing some popular English song. We went for “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da” by The Beatles and “Take It Easy” by The Eagles.

Since we were talking about fun, let me go on with his “guff”. He said that when he was young, he did a triple somersault from the top of the Shivapuri Hill and landed on the bottom. He also told us of the world’s most expensive “paan” which would disappear as soon as you place it in your mouth. Triple D told us tales of his school days in Darjeeling at St. Paul’s. He told us of his school days and made us realise how lucky were to have such facilities around us. He made us realise how grateful we must be to our parents and school who have provided us with education, entertainment, shelter, food, care and everything else. He made sure we didn’t complain about not having the premium services. In his thoughts, I realised that I should enjoy this glorious life and that making others happy was what mattered. He believed that in a fair world and that everyone is equal. One time when the Kanchenjunga boys won the swimming competition, he took us all for Mo:Mo with his own money. The reason because he believed we deserve something more than a trophy for the effort we put in. For us boys who were always hungry at school, this was exactly what we could only dream of. FREE MO:MO.

This man had a heart. I remember countless times when after prep time we could surround him all the up the spiral staircase to listen to him talk. He made fun of us and left us terror-struck at times, but his smile was as beautiful as a woman’s. With time, we realised that it wasn’t fear that drove us to achieve greatness but respect for him and respect for ourselves. I’ll always remember the short Christian references he made while giving us lessons and all his impossible stories. We were his sons and he was our father.

Late Mr. DD Dewan will forever be in our memories as one of the greatest teachers of our generation. RIP.